The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  “Shut up. Just shut the bloody hell up.”

  What are you listening for, Mina?

  Lord Godalming lit his pipe, some Turkish blend, exotic spice and smoke, sulphur from his match. He broke into the argument, something about the approaching storm, about turning back.

  What do you expect you’ll hear?

  The thunder answered her, much closer this time, and a sudden, cold gust was blown out before the storm.

  He’s not here, Mina. He’s not here.

  Off in the mountains, drifting down through passes and trees, a wild animal cried out, just once, in pain or fear or maybe anger. And Mina opened her eyes, blinked, waiting for the cry to come again, but then the thunder cracked like green wood overhead and the first drops of rain, fat and cold, began to fall. The Professor took her arm, leading her away, mumbling Dutch under his breath, and they left Jonathan standing there, staring blankly up at the castle. Lord Godalming waited, helpless, at his side.

  And in the falling rain, her tears lost themselves, and no one saw them.

  November 1919

  Fleeing garish victory, Mina had come back to Whitby hardly two weeks after the armistice. Weary homecomings for the living and maimed and flag-draped caskets. She’d left Quincey behind to settle up his father’s affairs.

  From the train, the lorry from the station, her bags carried off to a room she hadn’t seen yet; she would not sleep at the Westenra house at the Crescent, although it was among the portion of the Godalming estate left to her after Arthur Holmwood’s death. She took her tea in the inn’s tiny dining room, sitting before the bay windows. From there she could see down the valley, past red roofs and whitewash to the harbour pilings and the sea. The water glittered, sullen under the low sky. She shivered and pulled her coat tighter, sipped at the Earl Gray and lemon in cracked china, the cup glazed as dark as the brooding sky. And if she looked back the other way, towards East Cliff, she might glimpse the ruined abbey, the parish church, and the old graveyard.

  Mina refilled her cup from the mismatched teapot on the table, stirred at the peat-coloured water, watching the bits of lemon pulp swirl in the little maelstrom.

  She’d go to the graveyard later, maybe tomorrow.

  And again the fact, the cold candour of her situation, washed over and through her; she had begun to feel like a lump of gravel polished smooth by a brook. That they were all dead now, and she’d not attended even a single funeral. Arthur first, almost four years back now, and then Jack Seward, lost at Suvla Bay. The news about Jonathan hadn’t reached her until two days after the drunken cacophony of victory had erupted in Trafalgar Square and had finally seemed to engulf the whole of London. He’d died in some unnamed village along the Belgian border, a little east of Valenciennes, a senseless German ambush only hours before the cease-fire.

  She laid her spoon aside, watched the spreading stain it made on her napkin. The sky was ugly, bruised.

  A man named MacDonnell, a grey-bearded Scotsman, had come to her house, bearing Jonathan’s personal things – his pipe, the brass-framed daguerreotype of her, an unfinished letter. The silver crucifix he’d worn like a scar the last twenty years. The man had tried to comfort her, offering half-heard reassurances that her husband had been as fine a corporal as any on the Front. She thought sometimes that she might have been more grateful to him for his trouble.

  She still had the unfinished letter, carried with her from London, and she might look at it again later, though she knew it almost by heart now. Scribblings she could hardly recognize as his, mad and rambling words about something trailing his battalion through the fields and muddy trenches.

  Mina sipped her tea, barely noticing that it had gone cold, and watched the clouds outside as they swept in from the sea and rushed across the rocky headland.

  A soupy fog in the morning, misty ghosts of ships and men torn apart on the reef, and Mina Harker followed the curve of stairs up from the town, past the ruined Abbey, and into the old East Cliff church yard. It seemed that even more of the tombstones had tumbled over, and she remembered the elderly sailors and fishermen and whalers that had come here before, Mr Swales and the others, and wondered if anyone ever came here now. She found a bench and sat, looking back down to where Whitby lay hidden from view. The yellow lantern eyes of the light houses winked in the distance, bookending the invisible town below.

  She unfolded Jonathan’s letter and the chilling breeze fingered the edges of the paper.

  The foghorns sounded, that throaty bellow, perplexed and lonesome.

  Before leaving London, she’d taken all the papers, the typed pages and old notebooks, the impossible testament of the Company, from the wall safe where Jonathan had kept them. Now they were tucked carefully inside the brocade canvas satchel resting on the sandy cobbles at her feet.

  “. . . and burn them, Mina, burn every trace of what we have seen,” scrawled in that handwriting that was Jonathan’s, and also surely no one’s she’d ever met.

  And so she had sat at the hearth, these records in her lap, watching the flames, feeling the heat on her face. Had lifted a letter to Lucy from the stack, held the envelope a moment, teasing the fire as a child might tease a cat with table scraps.

  “No,” she whispered, closing her eyes against the hungry orange glow, and putting the letter back with the rest. It’s all I have left, and I’m not that strong.

  Far out at sea, she thought she heard bells, and down near Tate Hill Pier, a dog barking. But the fog made a game of sound and she couldn’t be sure she’d heard anything but the surf and her own breathing. Mina lifted the satchel and set it on the bench beside her.

  Earlier that morning she’d stood before the looking glass in her room at the inn, staring into the soft eyes of a young woman, not someone who had seen almost forty-two years and the horrors of her twentieth. As she had so often done before her own mirrors, she’d looked for the age that should have begun to crease and ruin her face and found only the faintest crow’s feet.

  “. . . every trace, Mina, if we are ever to be truly free of this terrible damnation.”

  She opened the satchel and laid Jonathan’s letter inside, pressed it between the pages of his old diary, then snapped the clasp shut again. Now, she thought, filled suddenly with the old anger, black and acid, I might fling it into the sea, lose these memories here, where it started.

  Instead, she hugged the bag tightly to her and watched the light-houses as the day began to burn the mist away.

  Before dusk, the high clouds had stacked themselves out beyond Kettleness, filling the eastern sky with thunderheads, their bruise-black underbellies already dumping sheets of rain on a foamy white sea. Before midnight, the storm had reared above Whitby Harbour and made landfall. In her narrow room above the kitchen, framed in wood and plaster and faded gingham wall paper haunted by a hundred thousand boiled cabbages, Mina dreamed.

  She was sitting at the small window, shutters thrown back, watching the storm walk the streets, feeling the icy salt spray and rain on her face. Jonathan’s gold pocket watch lay open on the writing desk, ticking loud above the crash and boom outside. MacDonnell had not brought the watch back from Belgium, and she’d not asked him about it.

  Quick and palsied fingers of lightning forked above the rooftops and washed the world in an instant of daylight.

  On the bed behind her, Lucy said something about Churchill and the cold wind and laughed. Chandelier diamond tinkling and asylum snigger between velvet and gossamer and rust-scabbed iron bars.

  And still laughing, “Bitch . . . apostate, Wilhelmina coward.”

  Mina looked down, watching the hands, hour, minute, second, racing themselves around the dial. The fob was twisted and crusted with something dark.

  “Lucy, please . . .” and her voice came from very far away, and it sounded like a child asking to be allowed up past her bedtime.

  Groan and bedspring creak, linen rustle and a sound wetter than the pounding rain. Lucy Westenra’s footsteps moved across the b
are floor, her heels clocking, ticking off the shortening distance.

  Mina looked back down, and Drawbridge Road was absurdly crowded with bleating sheep, soppy wool in the downpour, and the gangling shepherd, a scarecrow blown from the wheat fields west of Whitby. Twiggy fingers beneath his burlap sleeve, driving his flock towards the harbour.

  Lucy was standing very close now. Stronger than the rain and the old cabbage stink, anger that smelled like blood and garlic bulbs and dust. Mina watched the sheep and the storm.

  “Turn around, Mina. Turn around and look at me and tell me that you even loved Jonathan.”

  Turn around Mina and tell

  “Please, Lucy, don’t leave me here.”

  and tell me that you even loved

  And the sheep were turning, their short necks craning upwards and she saw they had red little rat eyes, and then the scarecrow howled.

  Lucy’s hands were cool silk on Mina’s fevered shoulders.

  “Don’t leave, not yet . . .”

  And Lucy’s fingers, like hairless spider legs, had crawled around Mina’s cheeks, and seized her jaw. Something brittle and dry, something crackling papery against her teeth, was forced past her lips.

  On the street, the sheep were coming apart in the storm, reduced to yellowed fleece and fat-marbled mutton; a river of crimson sluicing between paving stones. Grinning skulls and polished white ribs, and the scarecrow had turned away, and broken up in the gale.

  Lucy’s fingers pushed the first clove of garlic over Mina’s tongue, then shoved another into her mouth.

  And she felt the cold steel at her throat.

  We loved you, Mina, loved you as much as the blood and the night and even as much as

  Mina Harker woke up in the hollow space between lightning and thunderclap.

  Until dawn, when the storm tapered off to gentle drizzle and distant echoes, she sat alone on the edge of the bed, shaking uncontrollably and tasting bile and remembered garlic.

  January 1922

  Mina held the soup to the Professor’s lips, chicken steam curling in the cold air. Abraham Van Helsing, eighty-seven and so much more dead than alive, tried to accept a little of the thin, piss-yellow broth. He took a clumsy sip, and the soup spilled from his mouth, dribbling down his chin into his beard. Mina wiped his lips with the stained napkin lying across her lap.

  He closed his grey-lashed eyes and she set the bowl aside. Outside, the snow was falling again, and the wind yowled wolf noises around the corners of his old house. She shivered, trying to listen, instead, to the warm crackle from the fire place, and the Professor’s laboured breath. In a moment, he was coughing again, and she was helping him sit up, holding his handkerchief.

  “Tonight, Madam Mina, tonight . . .” and he smiled, wan smile, and his words collapsing into another fit, the wet consumptive rattle. When it passed, she eased him back into the pillows, and noticed a little more blood on the ruined handkerchief.

  Yes, she thought, perhaps. And once she would have tried to assure him that he would live to see spring and his damned tulips and another spring after that, but she only wiped the sweaty strands of hair from his forehead, and pulled the moth-gnawed quilt back around his bony shoulders.

  Because there was no one else and nothing to keep her in England, she’d made the crossing to Amsterdam the week before Christmas; Quincey had been taken away by the influenza epidemic after the war. Just Mina now, and this daft old bastard. And soon enough, there would be only her.

  “Shall I read for a bit, Professor?” They were almost halfway through Mr Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold. She was reaching for the book on the nightstand (and saw that she’d set the soup bowl on it) when his hand, dry and hot, closed softly around her wrist.

  “Madam Mina,” and already he was releasing her, his parchment touch withdrawn and there was something in his eyes now besides cataracts and the glassy fever flatness. His breath wheezed in, then forced itself harshly out again.

  “I am afraid,” he said, his voice barely a rasping whisper slipped into and between the weave of the night.

  “You should rest now, Professor,” she told him, wishing against anything he might say.

  “So much a fraud I was, Madam Mina.”

  Did you ever even love?

  “It was my hand that sent her, by my hand.”

  “Please, Professor. Let me call for a priest. I can not...”

  The glare that flashed then behind his eyes – something wild and bitter, a vicious humour – made her look away, scissoring her fraying resolve.

  “Ah,” he sighed, and “Yes,” and something strangled that might have been laughter. “So, I confess my guilt. So, I scrub the blood from my hands with that other blood?”

  The wind banged and clattered at the shuttered windows, looking for a way inside. And for a moment, the empty space filled with mantel-clock ticking and the wind and his ragged breathing, there was nothing more.

  Then he said, “Please, Madam Mina, I am thirsty.”

  She reached for the pitcher and the chipped drinking glass.

  “Forgive me, sweet Mina . . .”

  The glass was spotty, and she wiped roughly at its rim with her blue skirt.

  “. . . had it been hers to choose . . .” and he coughed again, once, a harsh and broken sound, and Mina wiped at the glass harder.

  Abraham Van Helsing sighed gently, and she was alone.

  When she was done, Mina carefully returned the glass to the table with the crystal pitcher, the unfinished book, and the cold soup. When she turned to the bed, she caught her reflection in the tall dressing mirror across the room. The woman staring back could easily have passed for a young thirty. Only her eyes, hollow, bottomless things, betrayed her.

  May 1930

  As twilight faded from the narrow rue de l’Odéon, Mina Murray sipped her glass of Chardonnay and roamed the busy shelves of Shakespeare and Company. The reading would begin soon, some passages from Colette’s new novel. Mina’s fingers absently traced the spines of the assembled works of Hemingway and Glenway Wescott and D. H. Lawrence, titles and authors gold or crimson or flat-black pressed into cloth. Someone she half-recognized from a café or party or some other reading passed close, whispering a greeting, and she smiled in response, then went back to the books.

  And then Mlle Beach was asking everyone to please take their seats, a few straight-backed chairs scattered among the shelves and bins. Mina found a place close to the door and watched as the others took their time, quietly talking among themselves, laughing at unheard jokes. Most of them she knew by sight, a few by name and casual conversation, one or two by reputation only. Messieurs Pound and Joyce, and Radclyffe Hall in her tailored English suit and sapphire cuff links. There was an unruly handful of minor Surrealists she recognized from the rue Jacob bistro where she often took her evening meals. And at first unnoticed, a tallish young woman, unaccompanied, choosing a chair off to one side.

  Mina’s hands trembled, and she spilled a few drops of the wine on her blouse.

  The woman sat down, turning her back to Mina. Beneath the yellowish glow of the bookstore’s lamps, the woman’s long hair blazed red-gold. The murmuring pack of Surrealists seated themselves in the crooked row directly in front of Mina, and she quickly looked away. Sudden sweat and her mouth gone dry, a dull under current of nausea, and she hastily, clumsily, set her wine glass on the floor.

  That name, held so long at bay, spoken in a voice she thought she’d forgotten.

  Lucy.

  Mina’s heart, an arrhythmic drum, raced inside her chest like a frightened child’s.

  Sylvia Beach was speaking again, gently hushing the murmuring crowd, introducing Colette. There was measured applause as the writer stepped forward, and something sarcastic mumbled by one of the Surrealists. Mina closed her eyes tightly, cold and breathing much too fast, sweaty fingers grip ping at the edges of her chair. Someone touched her arm and she jumped, almost cried out, gasping loud enough to draw attention.

  “Ma
demoiselle Murray, êtes-vous bon?”

  She blinked, dazed, recognizing the boy’s unshaven face as one of the shop’s clerks, but unable to negotiate his name.

  “Oui, je vais bien.” And she tried to smile, blinking back sucking in vertigo and dismay. “Merci . . . je suis désolé.”

  He nodded, doubtful, reluctantly returning to his windowsill behind her.

  At the front of the gathering, Colette had begun to read, softly relinquishing her words. Mina glanced to where the red-haired woman had sat down, half expecting to find the chair empty, or occupied by someone else entirely. She whispered a faithless prayer that she’d merely hallucinated, or suffered some trick of light and shadow. But the woman was still there, though turned slightly in her seat so that Mina could now see her profile, her full lips and familiar cheekbones. The smallest sound, a bated moan, escaped from Mina’s pale lips, and she saw an image of herself, rising, pushing past bodies and through the bookstore’s doors, fleeing headlong through the dark Paris streets to her tiny flat on Saint-Germain.

  Instead, Mina Murray sat perfectly still, watching, in turn, the reader’s restless lips and the delicate features of the nameless red-haired woman wearing Lucy Westenra’s face.

  After the reading, as the others milled and mingled, spinning respectful pretensions about Sido (and Madame Colette in general), Mina inched towards the door. The crowd seemed to have doubled during the half hour, and she squeezed, abruptly claustrophobic, between shoulders and cigarette smoke. But four or five of the rue Jacob Surrealists were planted solidly – typically confrontational – in the shop’s doorway, muttering loudly among themselves, the novelist already forgotten in their own banter.

  “Pardon,” she said, speaking just loudly enough to be heard above their conversation. “Puis-je . . .” Mina pointed past the men, to the door.

  The one closest to her, gaunt and unwashed, almost pale enough to pass for an albino, turned towards her. Mina remembered his face, its crooked nose. She’d once seen him spit at a nun outside the Deux Magots. He gave no sign that he intended to let her pass, and she thought that even his eyes looked unclean. Carrion eyes, she thought.